It begins and ends with “Les Meutes” in Casablanca. Between the two, the story of this award-winning film at the Cannes Film Festival is quickly told: Issam and his father Hassan find themselves reluctantly with a body that needs to be removed. From this contradictory anecdote emerges a thriller that is as black as it is funny and tragic. With his first feature film, which hits cinemas this Wednesday, July 19, Moroccan director Kamal Lazraq has created a masterpiece with images as powerful as a full moon night.
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4 mins
It looks like a Greek tragedy, the packs replacing the chorus, a struggle of life and death, a tension between love, hate, honor and doom, all overpowered by a supernatural power. We viewers have the impression of witnessing this fateful call for father and son live, filmed at night, in the popular suburbs of Casablanca, in a unity of time and place.
Kamal Lazraq and his film, both born in Casablanca
The packsit’s the human adventure of two broke people, father and son, captured with a certain obsession for the surreal magic of natural night light: ” With cinematographer Amine Berrada we said that the actors are at the heart of the device, we won’t be recreating artificial light, we’re going to really go with the natural lighting of the city. explains director Kamal Lazraq. The faces of the actors are very cinematic. Sometimes you just had to move them into the right place to get a very cinematic image. »
Shot with non-professional actors who make the screen pop, the film also seduces with its incredible importance, framing the essence of the plots and the supernatural of the spirits and landscapes. Born 39 years ago in Casablanca himself, Kamal Lazraq has dreamed of making a film there since graduating from La Fémis in Paris. After a short film in 2014, The man with the dogThe breathtaking performance of his first feature film represents far more than the realization of a cinematic fantasy: Casablanca, at night there is an infinite potential of stories, themes, genres: burlesque, tragedy, humanity, violence… »
The Universal, Morocco and the Masculine
Many aspects of the film touch on the universal: the relationship between father and son (excellently embodied by Ayoub Elaïd and Abdellatif Masstouri), the struggle between good and evil, the fight against death, yet the specific evils of Moroccan society implicitly appear, appear even slowly but surely as one of the central themes of the film, like the poison of patriarchal structures. For the father, the over-reflective son is not a “real” man. For the son, the father, a former prison inmate, missed his life. Only one person is really in charge: the grandmother. Despite adversity, she holds fast to her faith, teaches values, and knows how to adapt to the vagaries and trials of life.
« Masculinity is very present in the film. Actors mostly talk about being a man, masculinity as an inevitably positive quality. The idea was born to show how this excess of masculinity can sometimes veer towards animality, hence the dogfight metaphor and this bestiality that can come up quite heavily throughout the film. »
The physical experience of « packs »
Very quickly, the true packs of the film are not the packs of attack dogs, but the human packs, the neighborhood gangs waging war in the midst of misery. And the director confronts the viewer with an exhausting journey that touches all five senses of our perception: there is the smell of the corpse, the physical contact between human and dog, the leftovers of meat prepared by the grandmother, the noises with no visible clues and much more the images sometimes just fantasizing…” What I didn’t want to do was make a psychological or overly psychological film. I wanted us to have a physical experience. Something organic, fleshy. All of the work done was done in a very instinctive, very raw way. That means we have a very carnal relationship to this story. »
At the Cannes Film Festival The packs caused a surprise and won the Jury Prize in the prestigious Un Certain Regard section. It wouldn’t be surprising if the audience wanted to give him the audience award.
► Also to listen to: All cinemas in the world with Kamal Lazraq for “Les Meutes”
